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Transcript of CHAPTER I - Shodhgangashodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/31040/7/07...In this chapter we...
CHAPTER I
Nehru's Co-ordinates of Nationalist Imagination
In this chapter we will be looking at Nehru's idea of nationalism. Since
Nehru's discourse runs through coordinates of concepts, we would make an
attempt to see them as such, by highlighting one aspect in the light of another
and find out how Nehru's ideas run through them and each aspect gets fused
into the other. Here, we would first take up how Nehru looks at the
relationship between tradition and science vis-a-vis each other and through
them what sense of a cultural and national identity emerges in his conception.
We would then focus on the larger context within each of the specific
conceptual ideas of these three coordinates which work under Nehru's overall
attitude towards the relationship between colonialism, nationalism and
modernity. This will help us to create a comprehensible picture of Nehru's
approach towards the issues at hand. Finally, we would look at how Nehru, in
his most important work, The Discovery of India, imagines the nation or
country he seeks to discover for himself, in order to place his own ideas in a
shape of this very imagination, where historical narrative is fused with a more
subjective element of an individualistic approach.
Tradition, Science, Identity:
The Mexican poet-critic Octavio Paz described Nehru as one who " belonged
to a double anti-tradition"1. Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, Nehru
developed close links with European culture and, as Paz points out, "drew
inspiration from the rebellious and heterodox thought of the West"2. On the
1 Paz, Octavia, Nehru: Man of Two Cultures & One World, Indian National Commission for Cooperation with UNESCO, New Delhi, 1967, p. 15-16 2 1bid. p.15-16
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other hand, Nehru's other lineage is traced by Paz back to his ancestors who
"had frequented the Mogul court and had absorbed Persian and Arabic
heritage", and to his family tradition from which "he had a vein of heterodoxy
vis-a-vis Hindu traditionalism"3. Nehru has written in his autobiography how he
was "accused by some leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha" of his "ignorance of
Hindu sentiments" because of his "defective education and general
background of 'Persian' culture"4. To this accusation Nehru had to say: "What
culture I possess, or whether I possess any at all, is a little difficult for me to
say"5. Nehru here highlights a kind of identity that Zymut Bauman has called:
"nomads" of modernity"6.
In his own admission, though India was in Nehru's "blood", he "approached
her like an alien critic", and "(t)o some extent .. came to her via the West"7.
This unique predicament of a cultural identity, which is part insider and part
outsider, undergoes a partial sense of apology. It is also inflicted upon them
by so-called "culturally rooted" people, who force them, in the words of
Bauman, "to prove the legality of their presence"8. The demand for such
legality is cultural in nature, and throws open a debate about the relationship
between culture, history and ethics. Colonialism further intervenes this debate
in a complicated manner. We shall look into this debate in another chapter.
Nehru has a diachronous view of India's cultural past(s) and refuses to place
tradition into any particular traditionalist framework. He understands
3 1bid. p. 15-16 4 Nehru, Jawaharlal, An autobiography, OUP, 1980, p. 169 5 Ibid. p. 169 6 Bauman, Zgmunt, Parvenu and Pariah: heroes and victims of modernity, (ed.), Irving Velody, The Politics of Postmodemity, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998, p. 24 . 7 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 50 (italics mine) a Bauman, Zgmunt, Parvenu and Pariah: heroes and victims of modernity, (ed.), Irving Velody, The Politics of Postmodemity, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998, p. 26 (italics mine)
10
Hinduism, f~r example, only in the "widest sense of Indian culture"9. This is
. not trying to equate religion into any nationalist framework. In fact, Nehru is
doing the very opposite. Hinduism and India are not co-terminus for Nehru.
The relationship between the two is mediated by a history that includes the
intervention of other faiths, viz., Buddhism, Jainism, Islam and Christianity. All
these religions came to acquire a distinctive identity within India's gee-cultural
boundary and in the process brought in changes within Hinduism itself. So
Nehru looks at the question of tradition in history as one where change is
definitive. This change comes from the historical examples of "synthesis"
which Nehru traces right back to the meeting between the Aryans and the
Dravidians, and later between the settlers and the Iranians, Greeks,
Parthians, Bactrians, Scythians, Huns, Turks (before Islam), early Christians,
Jews (and) Zoroastrians. He grants this phenomenon of synthesis to the
"astonishing inclusive capacity of Hinduism"10•
To Nehru, Hinduism thus represents a culture more than a religion, and in
this, he is one of the sole Indian nationalists of the era to have made this
distinction with historical reasons. Thus Nehru's idea of tradition is also
contextual: every tradition has its own "spirit" of historical evolution. "(T)here is
a special heritage for us in India" he writes in The Discovery, yet "not an
exclusive one, for none is exclusive and all are common to the race of man"11 •
Here Nehru does hint at a universality of thought and culture, though
premised upon a heterogeneity of cultures. Octavia Paz has noted how, in the
context of British colonialism in India, Nehru "saw the opposition between
9 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 74 10 Ibid. p. 74 11 Ibid. p. 59
11
East and West as the clash between -two historical realities"12. To Paz, "for-
Nehru, the clash between different cultures was rather fictitious; the real thing
was the historical opposition"13. So we find yet another distinction made by
Nehru: between culture and history. The debate between culture, history and
ethics surfaces again, this time fro.m Nehru's standpoint. We shall, as pointed
above, deal with this issue later.
Nehru raises the question of identity that is modern, but one that does not
come from the sole premises of Enlightenment rationality. It comes from a
Romantic sense of individuality where a person belongs both inside and
outside of one's culture. It comes from a lived experience of cultural
heterogeneity, which is not simply an issue about critical engagement with
one's tradition, which is also part of Romanticism, but from recognition of a
more diverse cultural history of one's identity. It is automatically individualistic
in nature.
Paz goes further to conclude: "Contrary to the anthropologists and the
historians who postulate the multiplicity of cultures, Nehru affirmed the unity of
thought and the universality of science, art and technology. In this
universality, he saw the answer to the antagonism of the historical worlds"14.
Here one cannot entirely agree with Paz. As we have seen, Nehru did have a
conception of cultural heterogeneity. The idea of universality works at two
levels in Nehru: One, the historical borrowings between cultures. Two, the
universality of reason. Nehru takes the cultural capacity for synthesis as a
12 Paz, Octavio, Nehru: Man of Two Cultures & One World, Indian National Commission for Cooperation with UNESCO, New Delhi, 1967, p. 13 13 1bid. p.14 14 Ibid. p.14
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normative. This cultural capacity within traditions, as mentioned before, also
has a contextual basis in Nehru. With regard to borrowing, Nehru however,
cautions:
"It should be equally obvious tha~ there can be no cultural or spiritual growth
based on imitation. Such imitation can only be confined to a small number
which cuts itself off from the masses and the springs of national life. True
culture derives its inspiration from every corner of the world but is home-
grown and has to be based on the wide mass of people . . . The day of a
narrow culture confined to a small fastidious group is past"15.
Here Nehru is trying to merge the idea of cultural synthesis with the idea of
democracy. What is imitation to Nehru is a cultural borrowing which is elitist in
nature. There is of course the question of "reason". The history of cultural
synthesis that Nehru treats as a normative, finds reason for the taking, in
terms of a universal tool of enquiry. In the history of culture, reason is the new
normative for Nehru. If democracy is the new political ideal of any culture, it is
through the critical faculty of reason that Nehru wants to address the
questions before that ideal. In this context, the Enlightenment debate between
tradition and reason surfaces in Nehru:
"As knowledge advances, the domain of religion, in the narrow sense of the
word, shrinks. The more we understand life and nature, the less we look for
supernatural causes"16. So it is "with the temper and approach of science,
15 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 564 (italics mine) 16 Ibid. p. 514
13
- -
allied to philosophy, and with reverence for all that lies beyond, that we must
face life"17.
Lets now follow the examples Chatterjee offers, where Nehru addresses the
Orientalist thematic, and the conclusions Chatterjee draws from them. First,
the passage which shows how Nehru "offers a direct rebuttal of the
essentialist dichotomy between Eastern and Western cultures"18:
"Ancient Greece is supposed to be the fountainhead of European civilization,
and much has been written about the fundamental difference between the
Orient and the Occident. I do not understand this; a great deal of it seems to
be vague and unscientific without much basis in fact. Till recently many
European thinkers imagined that everything that was worth while had its origin
in Greece or Rome . . . Even when some knowledge of what peoples in Asia
had done in the past soaked into the European mind, it was not willingly
accepted"19.
Chatterjee then goes to show how Nehru grasps the difference between the
East and the West in terms of "industrialization and lack of industrialization"20.
"I do not understand the use of the words Orient and Occident, except in the
sense that Europe and America are highly industrialized and Asia is backward
in this respect. This industrialization is something new in the world's history ...
17 Ibid. P- 512 18 Chatte~ee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?. OUP, DeihL 1986, p. 133 19 Ibid_ p. 133-134 20 Ibid_ p.134
14
There is no organic connection between Hellenic civilization and modern
European and American civilization"21.
Chatterjee draws from Nehru's account how Nehru finds "the spirit and
outlook of ancient Greece" to be "much closer to those of ancient India and
China" than the modern European nations22•
He concludes from Nehru's recounting of the past how, "nationalist thought
has come to grips with the Orienta list thematic; ... is now able to criticize it ...
has got rid of those cultural essentialisms that had confined it since birth and,
at last, it is able to look at the histories of the nation and the world in their true
specificities"23.
But a little later, Chatterjee discovers how, in terms of drawing India's own
cultural thematic, "the distinctions between the scientific and the unscientific,
the rational and the irrational, the practical and the metaphysical" in Nehru,
"are exactly those which, in their most general terms, had come to dominate
post-Enlightenment rationalist, and more specifically positivist, thought in
Europe"24. The below passage from The Discovery is where Chatterjee draws
our attention to:
"India, as well as China, must learn from the West, for the modern West has
much to teach, and the spirit of the age is represented by the West. But the
West is also obviously in need of learning much, and its advances in
technology will bring it little comfort if it does not learn some of the deeper
21 Ibid. p. 134 22 1bid. p. 134 23 Ibid. p. 134 24 Ibid. p.138-139
15
lessons of life, which have absorbed the minds of thinkers in all ages and in
all countries"25.
Chatterjee understands Nehru to be saying here that "we must learn the
material skills from the West without losing our spiritual heritage"28.
But is Nehru really saying this? Nehru isn't making any "spiritual" versus
"material" distinction in an essentialist sense at all. Nehru holds no serious
break between Indian cultural traditions and the modern, scientific spirit. As
he says:
"(t)he essential ideals of Indian culture are broad-based and can be adopted
to almost any environment. The bitter conflict between science and religion
which shook up Europe in the nineteenth century would have no reality in
India, nor would change based on the applications of science bring any
conflict with those ideals ... It is probable that in this process many vital
changes may be introduced in the old outlook, but they will not be super-
imposed from outside and will seem to grow naturally from the cultural
background of the people"26.
Nehru sees no quarrel between science and Indian culture. He feels that the
scientific way of thinking would "naturally'' emerge from within Indian culture.
He doesn't see science as culturally alien. Chatterjee has mentioned how
"Nehru could even assert ... that ancient Indian thought was much closer to the
25 Ibid. p. 138 25 Nehru Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 518 (italics mine)
16
spirit of the scientific attitude than the overall cultural values of the modern
West"27. In this context he quotes Nehru from The Discovery:
"Science has dominated the Western world and everyone there pays tribute to
it, and yet the West is still far from having developed the real temper of
science. It has still to bring the spirit and the flesh into creative harmony ... the
essential basis of Indian thought for ages past, though not its later
manifestations, fits in with the scientific temper and approach, as well as with
internationalism. It is based on a fearless search for truth, on the solidarity of
man, even on the divinity of everything living, and on the free and co-
operative development of the individual and the species, ever to greater
freedom and higher stages of human growth"28•
The point is, the spiritual-material dichotomy as created by post-
Enlightenment rationalist thought divides the two spheres into antagonistic
zones within a culture, and within the Orientalist thematic, it divides the
spheres ethnically.
Nehru, as Chatterjee has shown, comes to terms with the Orientalist thematic.
As pointed above, Nehru doesn't find a quarrel happening between science
and religion in Indian culture like it did in the West. Nehru never pitted science
and traditionalism in the language of a spiritual-material dichotomy. In fact, for
Nehru, 'scientific temper' means "a way of life, a process of thinking, a
method of acting and associating with our fellowmen ... It is the temper of a
free man"29. It is a democratic ideal to which Nehru relates the scientific
27 Chatte~ee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial W~rld: A Derivative Discourse?. OUP, Delhi, 1986, p. 139 28 Ibid. p. 139 29 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 512
17
temper, the way he related the- democratic idea with the issue of a genuine
cultural synthesis, as was shown above. It is strange how in his quote on
Nehru above, Chatterjee ignores how Nehru links the idea of the 'scientific
temper' with such a spiritual notion as "the divinity of everything living". Nehru,
hence, fuses the spiritual and the scientific. He finds the West wanting on the
ethical and moral side of this critical temper, which he equates with the
"solidarity of man", "free and co-operative development ... " and "greater
freedom".
In The Discovery, Nehru in fact clearly distinguishes between what he means
by 'science' and the 'scientific temper':
"Science deals with the domain of positive knowledge but the temper which it
should produce goes beyond that domain. The ultimate purposes of man may
be said to be to gain knowledge, to realize truth, to appreciate. goodness and
beauty. The scientific method of objective enquiry is not applicable to all
these, and much that is vital in life seems to lie beyond its scope - the
sensitiveness of art and poetry, the emotion that beauty produces, the inner
recognition of goodness"30.
We have pointed out how Nehru distinguishes between religion and culture,
where he treats religion as a dogmatic super structure and culture as a
normative between various religious traditions. Whenever he links the
scientific temper to the aesthetic and spiritual realm, it is the sense of this
cultural normative that he has in mind. Whenever he pits science against
tradition, he has a stricter understanding of tradition in mind.
30 Ibid. p. 512-13
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Like he says here in the context of the conflict between science and religion in
India in the modern age:
"Conflict, however, there will be, with much of the superstructure that has
grown up round those basic ideals and which exist and stifles us today. That
superstructure will inevitably have to go, because much of it is bad in itself
and contrary to the -spirit of the age. Those who seek to retain it do an ill
service to the basic ideals of Indian culture"31.
Nehru at times specifically points out against what he prefers science:
"India must lessen her religiosity and turn to science. She must get rid of the
exclusiveness in thought and social habit which has made life a prison for her,
stunning her spirit and preventing growth. The idea of ceremonial purity has
erected barriers against social intercourse and narrowed the sphere of social
action. The day-to-day religion of the orthodox Hindu is more concerned with
what to eat and what not to eat, who to eat with and from whom to keep away,
than with spiritual values. The rules and regulations of the kitchen dominate
his sociallife"32.
Though, as I have shown, there is a constant "tension" in Nehru between an
optimistic attitude towards science and a more cautious regard for cultural
traditions, it is of course true that Nehru was generally for a pro-scientific
progress about most things. And the post-Enlightenment bias in Nehru, as
pointed by Chatterjee, seems true in a general sense. Nehru was always
vehemently opposed to what he called "that narrowing religious outlook ...
31 Ibid. p. 518 32 Ibid. p. 520
19
that obsession with the supernatural and metaphysical speculations, that
loosening of the mind's discipline in religious ceremonial and mystical
emotionalism"33. On the other hand, even when "realizing ... (the) limitations.
of reason and scientific method, we have still to hold on to them with all our
strength, for without that firm basis and background we can have no grip on
any kind of truth or reality"34.
By this, Nehru seems to be indeed borrowing the dichotomy in post-
Enlightenment knowledge, creating a kind of scientific essentialism about
knowledge in general terms. But reason, in Nehru, as I have tried to show, is
not a normative in itself, but connected to two ideals: the ideal of cultural
synthesis and the ideal of democracy. What we would examine later is this
relationship between reason and the two ideals. It is strange again that
Chatterjee never brings up these two issues in his analysis of Nehru's
"nationalist" thought at all.
Chatterjee however points out how Nehru escapes the essentialist conception
of Orientalism only to fall back upon a "conjunctural" conception of historical
difference. Chatterjee concludes how Nehru looks at the difference between
the West and India as a difference in the process of industrialization on the
economic side, and as having lost its inner vigour and vitality, on the cultural
side. So the Orientalist thematic, according to Chatterjee, comes back in
terms of the way Nehru looks at India's history from an insider's point of view.
But for a "conjunctural" difference to become Orientalist, the justificatory
discourse of Orientalism and its substantive values have to be appropriated in
33 Ibid. p. 519-20 34 Ibid. p. 512
20
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the context of anti-colonial struggle, in the way Nehru looks at India's culture
and its economic options of renewal. It needs to be asked then, how Nehru's
discourse is able to justify an ideological critique of colonialism through the
same premises. Doesn't the critique of an essentialist Oriental discourse itself
intervene the conjunctural dichotomy in a political and ethical sense?
It is also true that though Nehru does believe that "(n)ational progress can ...
neither lie in a repetition of the past nor in its denial", he does vehemently
keep repeating in The Discovery that "there is no going back to the past"35.
Espousing a linear conception of historical progress, which is again post-
Enlightenment thought, Nehru seems quite clear that: "There is only one-way
traffic in time"36. But such assertions always end up being ambivalent in ~
~#'... \~~~;:,,
Nehru's overall discourse. Time always flows in two directions in Nehru. '(v/ri~,,~~~\ . z !...; )
' ~ \ ___.. \ . ...._ I'* In one of his famous lectures, Nehru spoke about the historical moment h~'~c.~~-/ /. 1:
~eM.et;.:;Y was in, being one of "tumult" and "confusion", where "we stand facing both ---~
ways, forward toward the future and backwards towards the past, being pulled
in two directions"37• Nehru's The Discovery is all about this anxiety and desire
to recover his past. Nehru understood that without being able to recover the
"past" for himself, he couldn't talk about the "present". The past haunts Nehru
till the end of the book. In the very beginning Nehru admits:
35 Ibid. p. 517 36 Ibid. p. 520 37 Nehru, Jawaharlal, India Today and Tomorrow, Azad Memorial Lectures, 1959, Indian Council for Cultural Relations, 1960, p. 7
21
TH 320.54
84697 Tw
li lllll//lllllll/1111' L 111111 TH12332
"The burden of the past, the burden of both good and ill, is over-powering,
and sometimes suffocating, more especially for those of us who belong to a
very ancient civilization"38•
It should be asked, what exactly was Nehru s~, anxious to recover from the
past, in a personal as well as general sense? From his account it appears that
Nehru, conscious of his partly outsider status with regard to his culture, and
equally conscious of his ties with that culture, sought an "entry" into his
country's history. We can link two fundamental responses in Nehru with
regard to this quest. As he says, "I was obsessed with the thought of India"
(an emotional response); and a little later, "I was eager and anxious to change
her outlook and appearance and give her the garb of modernity" (a critical
response)39• The question which triggers off The Discovery is what he asks
among other ones, on India: "How does she fit into the modern world?"40 It is
also asking the question: How do I as a modern subject, fit into India?
It is thus in the form of a modern engagement that Nehru undertakes this
endeavour. We have seen how Nehru has defended his double anti-traditional
status. He refused to belong to any particular tradition and in the same vein
argued for an anti-traditional modernity in India. One can say that he saw
India in the same image as he saw himself, a product of cultural borrowings
and a necessity to come out of the rigid shackles of the past. It's not that he
identified himself or India's true image, with that past entirely. The past had to
be as much created as he made himself. It was a matter of choice, a radical I
choice at that, where certain principles were at stake. The issue was not
38 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 36 39 Ibid. p. 49 40 Ibid. p. 49
22
merely cultural; it was ethical. We will analyze this notion of ethics later. To
me, at the level of identity, the question which Nehru poses in this discourse,
is: In what ways is it "possible" for a double anti-traditionalist identity - one
who both belongs to his culture and also partly an "alien" - to critically engage
himself with his culture? It is through his own sense of identity, as part insider
and part outsider, that Nehru enters the story of his country's history (and
politics). As a modern subject, Nehru finds himself culturally displaced. He
belongs to many cultures and none. Like many moderns, he has to re-invent
his identity. To re-invent his identity he has to first re-invent a past he can
"belong" to. This desire of belonging, though outwardly Romantic in nature,
has a "subjectivist" turn in Nehru, as we shall now see.
The subjectivist endeavour, as Charles Taylor explains, unlike the "original
Romantic yearning" for a return to "nature and unadorned feeling", turns "to a
retrieval of experience or interiority"41• It touches "the basic modes of
narrativity of disengaged reason, and of Romanticism"42• It combines "a view
of history as progress, in which the development of reason and science leads
to ever-greater instrumental control and hence well-being", and the view
which "presents history as a decline, but (it) also has an optimistic variant of
history as growth ... moving in the end towards a reconciliation of reason and
feeling.43. According to Taylor, this subjectivist stance or, what he calls "the
inward turn"44, looks at the predicament of the historical moment in this
manner:
41 Taylor, Charles, The Sources of the Self: The Making of Modem Identity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, p. 461 42 Ibid. p. 461 43 Ibid. p. 465 44 Ibid. p. 461
23
"The· present age is indeed spiritually indignant. We in our time need -to
recover the past in order to attain fullness. But this is not so much because
history has meant decline, as because the fullness of meaning isn't available
with the resources of a single age. And what is more ... we can recapture the
past, or rather, make the great moments and achievements of other times
come alive in ours"45.
We can compare this elucidation of Taylor with two citations from Nehru,
where his subjectivist stance, visible throughout the tension-ridden pages of
The Discovery, is amply clear. Here he says:
"India must break with much of her past and not allow it to dominate the
present. Our lives are encumbered with the dead wood of the past; all that is
dead and has served its purpose has to go. But that does not mean a break
with, or a forgetting of, the vital and life giving in that past.
We can never forget the ideals that have moved our race, the dreams of the
Indian people through the ages, the wisdom of the ancients ... the daring of
their thought, their splendid achievements in literature, art and culture, their
love of truth and beauty and freedom . . . their toleration of other ways than
theirs, their capacity to absorb other peoples and their cultural
accomplishments, to synthesize them and develop a varied and mixed culture
... We will never forget them or cease to take pride in that noble heritage of
ours. If India forgets them she will no longer remain India and much that has
made her our joy and pride will cease to be.
45 Ibid. p. 465
24
It is not this that we have to break with, but all the dust and dirt of ages that
have covered her up and hidden her inner beauty and significance, the
excrescences and abortions that have twisted and petrified her spirit ... We
have to .. . remember afresh the core of that ancient wisdom and adapt it to
our present circumstances"46. And further:
"There is something lacking in all this progress, which can neither produce
harmony between nations nor within the spirit of man. Perhaps more
synthesis and a little humility towards the wisdom of the past, which, after all,
is the accumulated experience of the human race, would help us to gain a
new perspective and greater harmony. That is especially needed by those
peoples who live a fevered life in the present only and have almost forgotten
the past"47.
So for Nehru, as much as it is necessary to capture the spirit of the age, it is
also important to capture the spirit of other ages. In this sense, Nehru
imagined the coming into being of "integrated personalities"48•
Being a heterodoxical identity, Nehru exemplifies a radical sense of
individualism in the way he recreates a personalized narrative (both
subjective and objective) of his links with his country's culture and the modern
culture of the West. He has a "thick" idea of individualism where the individual
should be able to critically make his way through the various conflicts and
choices across cultures. It is a demanding sense of individualism. The
individual, like Nehru, having severed his ties with lot many value-systems of
his or her tradition, is now faced with a vast body of cultural choices and a
46 Nehru, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 509 47 Ibid. p. 519 48 Ibid. p. 519
25
multiple identity. According to him, we have to "remain true Indians and
Asiatics, and become at the same time good internationalists and world
citizens". The key thing here is the distinction between "remain" and .
"become". The conception is that we remain unique to our cultural identity,
and at the same time strive to become the link for solidarities in the world of
other human beings. So Nehru argues for a double-responsibility for the
heterodoxical and democratic identity. Also a double normative: the cultural
self should be synthetic enough to remain "Indian" and democratic enough to
become a "good internationalist". In a way, it looks like an objective variation
of a subjective choice, which in Nehru, springs from a synthetic idea of a
history of the cultural self and enlarges into a synthetic idea of co-operation
and comradeship. There is of course the idea of the rational self, which is able
to both (dis)engage critically and able to make radical choices. But this critical
element of the self is required to reinforce its ties with the various "other"
peoples of the world. The difference which Nehru draws between what we
should "remain" and what we should "become" is of course alive to the
question of remaining different even as we strive for a unity. It does not seek
the annulment of individuality, which is faced with cultural reciprocity. For
Nehru, the culturally distinct individual is also the integrated personality who
has made the ideas of the world his own. Finally, this image of the individual
self-identity that Nehru seems to draw is located within the debate between
culture, history and ethics, which we would look into later.
Colonialism, Nationalism and Modernity:
It is interesting to note that when Nehru first touches upon the issue of
nationalism in The Discovery, he neither equates it with any definition of India
26
- --as a "nation", nor treats the idea of nationalism as an end in itself, even within
the context of the anti-colonial movement:
"For any subject country national freedom must be the first and dominant
urge; for India, with her intense sense of individuality and a past heritage, it
was doubly so"49.
It is clear that Nehru treats "national freedom" in the context of India being a
"subject country", but India is not merely a subject country: it is a place with
an "intense sense of individuality", and has a "past heritage". It seems, for
Nehru, national freedom means a specific political cause in a particular
historical context, but what makes national freedom a justified cause is linked
to the question of a country's "individuality'' which lies outside the specific
context of not only colonialism but nationalism as well, partly resting upon the
unique history of her heritage, and partly as of course, to the modern idea of
"individuality", which Nehru treats as a value linked to issues of democracy
and culture as we have seen. The problems of a country's individuality are
only partially linked to the issue of anti-colonial nationalism for Nehru, as
much as the issues of culture. These issues are linked to an amorphous
construct of "India", which we shall examine later. But in specific terms these
are some of the indicators in Nehru's ideas:
'The nationalist ideal is deep and strong; it is not a. thing of the past with no
future significance. But other ideals, more based on the ineluctable facts of to-
day, have arisen, the international ideal and the proletarian ideal, and there
49 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 52
27
- --must be some kind of fusion between these various ideals if were to have a
world equilibrium and a lessening of conflict.
The abiding appeal of nationalism to the spirit of man has to be recognized
and provided for, but its sway limJted to a narrow sphere"50.
So until nationalism, for Nehru, doesn't lead to the "fusion" between "various
ideals", it will always remain in the "narrow sphere", which Nehru identifies
with a static and rigid traditionalism. Nehru wonders in The Discovery.
"(E)ven to-day it is strange how we suddenly become overwhelmed by
tradition, and the critical faculties of even intelligent men cease to function.
This may be partly due to the nationalism that consumes us in our present
subject state. Only when we are politically and economically free will the mind
function normally and critically"51.
So nationalism is a temporary hindrance to the mind functioning "normally"
and "critically". It is of course an inevitable and partly necessary development
in the present circumstances. Yet we should always try to look beyond it. The
desire for the "normal" and the "critical" again seems to throw Nehru into the
post-Enlightenment category of thinking. But one must notice here that Nehru
regards the present context as overwhelmingly biased towards a rigid
traditionalist imagination. Nehru seeks to cut through this discourse with the
elements of reason. One finds Nehru arguing for a more balanced acceptance
of the importance of reason in a society he considers rigidly traditionalist, than
arguing for an absolute dominance of reason. In fact, if this had not been
50 Ibid. p. 53 51 Ibid. P- 103
28
Nehru's stance, the tension within his strong pleas for scientific thinking and
his subjectivist forays into India's cultural history, wouldn't have appeared
constantly throughout his writings. We can see it in his particular attitude
towards nationalism itself.
"Nationalism" Nehru defines, "is essentially a group memory about past
achievements, traditions, and experiences"52. He contends that "one of the .
remarkable developments of the present age has been the rediscovery of the
past and the nation"53.
Again on the other hand, Nehru has this to say:
"(N)ationalism by itself seemed to me definitely a narrow and insufficient
creed. Political freedom, independence, were no doubt essential, but they
were steps only in the right direction; without social freedom and the
socialistic structure of society and the state, neither the country nor the
individual could develop"54.
Nehru was primarily anxious of how others hide vested interest under cover of
communalism or even nationalism, something of the nature of religious
revivalism. He was categorical about this: "You may well have described
Hindu communalism as Hindu nationalism and Muslim communalism as
Muslim nationalism and you would have been correct"55•
52 Ibid. p. 515 53 Ibid. p. 515 54 Nehru, Jawaharlal, An Autobiography, OUP, 1980, p. 166 55 Wolpert, Stanley, Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996, p. 477
29
About the rise of the Hindu communities like the Marathas and the Rajputs -
against the last phase of Mughal rule in India, which Nehru calls nationalistic,
he has this to say:
"That combination of religion and nationalism gained_ strength and
cohesiveness from both elements, and yet its ultimate weakness and
insufficiency were also derived from that mixture. For it could only be an
exclusive and partial nationalism, not including the many elements in India
that lay outside that religious sphere. Hindu nationalism was a natural growth
from the soil of India, but inevitably it comes in the way of the larger
nationalism which rises above differences of cast and creed"56.
Nehru identifies the age-old historical representation of India in "synthesis".
We will have occasion to analyze this issue later. Lets now trace Nehru's
ideas on what he identifies as colonialism.
Just as Nehru had found instances of nationalism in India's ancient and
medieval periods, it was the same with colonialism. Interestingly, the first
issue he takes up with regard to the colonial issue is the writing of history:
"History is alniost always written by the victors and conquerors and gives their
viewpoint; or, at any rate, the victors' version is given prominence and holds
the field. Very probably, all the early records we have of the Aryans in India,
their epics and traditions, glorify the Aryans and are unfair to the people of the
country whom they subdued. No individual can wholly rid himself of his racial
outlook and cultural limitations, and when there is conflict between races and
countries even an attempt at impartiality is considered a betrayal of one's
56 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 272
30
people . . . The overpowering need of the moment is to justify one's own
actions and condemn and blacken those of the enemy ...
... In the old days when war and its consequences, brutality and conquest
and enslavement of a people, were accepted as belonging to the natural
order of events, there was no particular need to cover them or justify them
from some other point of view. With the growth of higher standards the need
for justification has arisen, and it leads to a perversion of facts, sometimes
deliberate, often unconscious"57.
So Nehru accounts for the inherent biases behind colonial history. But what
about nationalist historiography?
"Indians" he wrote, "are peculiarly liable to accept tradition and report as
history, uncritically and without sufficient examination"58. But "the impact of
science and the modern world have brought a greater appreciation of facts, a
more critical faculty, a weighing of evidence, a refusal to accept tradition
merely because it is tradition"59. However, Nehru is quick to point out that
many "competent historians ... err on the other side and their work is more a
meticulous chronicle of facts than living history"60. He doesn't explain what
this living history would be, but elsewhere he speaks of the need for a "living
philosophy" which shouldn't remain "unconnected with the day-to-day
problems of life and the needs of men and women"61. We can read it as an
understanding of history which takes into account present day issues and how
these issues re-orient our need to re-examine the past and come out with new
57 Ibid. p. 289 58 Ibid. p. 104 59 Ibid. p. 102-103 60 Ibid. p. 103 61 Ibid. p. 31
31
perspectives. This is precisely what Nehru himself undertakes to do in The
Discovery, which is unique in its attempt to look at the past in the light of
present day concerns. In this way we find Nehru trying to grasp how .
"nationalist" historiography might come to address what Benedict Anderson
calls the "philosophical poverty" of nationalism62.
In an Indian writing of history, Nehru would definitely not be in favour of a
right-wing glorification of the past. He would also steer away from the
Orientalist notions about India's cultural attributes, and for that very reason,
would not hesitate to call India both "metaphysical" and "religious", as well as
highlighting the traditions of reason in the philosophies of the past.
Nehru, as Chatterjee has shown, and as mentioned before, counters the
Orientalist thematic by saying how India "it is said, is religious, philosophical,
speculative, metaphysical, unconcerned with this world, and lost in dreams of
the beyond . . . and perhaps those who tell us so would like India to remain
plunged in thought and speculation, so that they might possess this world"63.
But immediately afterwards, Nehru does add: "Yes, India has been all this but
also much more than this"64. The dichotomy of Orientalist thought is collapsed
within the context of the Indian "nationalist" thematic, as opposing elements
are integrated within the framework of Indian culture.
To bring back an earlier point to context, Chatterjee's view that Nehru
negativizes the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of Indian culture against
the scientific and rational, and hence betrays a post-Enlightenment discourse
62 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, Verso, London, 1983, p. 5. 63 Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, OUP, Delhi, 1986,p. 134 64 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 152
32
of knowledge, is a rash argument. Nehru has highlighted both, the traditions
of reason in Indian philosophy along with the metaphysical and the poetic, in
positive terms. What he pointed out was how in course of time, the rational
side of thinking was given up in favour of the purely ritual and instrumentalist
rigidities of religious thought:
"A rational spirit of inquiry, so evident in earlier times, which might well have
led to the further growth of science, is replaced by irrationalism and a blind
idolatry of the past"65•
Nehru does criticize the "lack of historical sense" in the people of ancient
India, but attaches a degree of importance to "the speculative and ethical
trends of philosophy and religion", which he contends was "far more difficult"
though "inevitably more vaguer and more .indefinite", but "often very critical
and sometimes skeptical"66•
Let us now look at how Nehru introduces the phenomenon of modernity and
in that light see how he constructs the issues confronting colonialism. In a
way, the two overlap each other as is inevitable. However, one thing is
perhaps important to note that though The Discovery is a product of this
confrontation with British colonialism and the advent of modernity in India,
Nehru begins the narrative with an inward looking thrust, where the question
of self-discovery becomes paramount in the face of the colonial situation,
which brought in radical changes in India's social and cultural world. In this
sense, it is a philosophical enquiry, aimed at a self-understanding, and of
one's relationship with the world. This attitude is all but scientific, and in a way
65 Ibid. p. 54 66 Ibid. p. 102
33
militates against the strong prescriptions of scientific reason, which Nehru ·
pleads for. This is the fundamental paradox of Nehru's narrative, more of
which we shall discuss later in this Chapter.
Lets now turn to how Nehru makes a distinction between British colonialism
and the baggage of modernity:
"The impact of western culture on India was the impact of a dynamic society,
a 'modern' consciousness, on a static society wedded to medieval habits of
thought which, however sophisticated and advanced in its own way, could not
progress because of its inherent limitations. And, yet, curiously enough the
agents of this historic process, were not only wholly unconscious of their
mission in India, but, as a class, actually represented no such process. In
England their class fought this historic process but the forces opposed to
them were too strong and could not be held back. In India they had a free field
and were successful in applying the brakes to that very change and progress
which, in the larger context, they represented. They encouraged and
consolidated the position of the socially reactionary groups in India, and
opposed all those who worked for political and social change. If change came
it was in spite of them or as an incidental and unexpected consequence of
their activities. The introduction of the steam engine and the railway was a big
step towards a change of the medieval structure, but it was intended to
consolidate their rule and facilitate the exploitation for their own benefit of the
interior of the country"67.
67 Ibid. p. 291
34
We ·are again faced with a . narrative, which sounds close to the colonial
narrative on India. After all, British colonialists justified the ideological content
of their rule through the dichotomy between the "dynamic" and the "static". But
I
again, we have to make a difference between Nehru's perspective and the
colonialist's. The colonialist presented the dichotomy as part of their grand
narrative of colonialism. Nehru's observation is analytical and critical. It
fundamentally counters the colonial narrative by positing liberation against
domination, even if faced with similar perspectives regarding the state of
Indian society. It raises a crucial question, whether representation of a certain
kind automatically opens up justifications for domination. The relationship
between representation and domination includes the question of intentionality
and agency. In Nehru's case, the thematic of the intentional object, the Indian
"nation", is represented in a self-critical as well as self-evolutionary manner,
dissolving the Orientalist dichotomy between the east and the west in
ethnocentric and essentialist terms, as has been pointed out. The notion of
agency works, in Nehru's case, through this anti-colonial consciousness that
is ideological, without however being relativistic about choices. It means, in
Nehru, the idea of choices is not bound by a historical antagonism but rather
open to a plurality where the merits of choices are made out of the rational
position of one's own subjective freedom with regard to choices. In this, the
question of power is seen to be not holding authority either to one's subjective
position or to the way choices are made. Hence the idea of cross-cultural
choices is always a rational possibility in Nehru. Intentionality, in this context,
itself grants autonomy to choices made from within the forms of interaction
between western knowledge and Indian predicaments. We cannot look at the
question of autonomy "outside" the interaction between the West and India,
35
· unless we are being ethnocentric. Chatterjee calls the ideology of Indian
nationalist discourse "inauthentic" because of its "lack of autonomy". But
autonomy is always the autonomy to choose, and if values are not.
ethnocentric, then the choice of values need not be based on an ethnocentric
difference of power as well. What is being argued here is that any subject
position cannot be presupposed either as an inauthenticity or within a
privileged space of autonomy with regard to choices as autonomy itself arises
out of one's ability to choose prior to value judgments against it. In other
words, it is against the intentionality of someone else's intentions that one
chooses to make oneself autonomous. We cannot choo~e outside this
situation and therefore to call a discourse inauthentic becomes an absolutist
argument. Between ethnocentrism and an a priori notion of universalism lie
what Michel Walzer calls "reiterative universality"68• Even Chatterjee.
pronounces the desire of an ideological critique of nationalist thought, which
would "connect" the "popular strength" of nationalist struggles to "the
consciousness of a new universality"69.
In whatever terms Chatterjee might see this new universality, the very appeal
to and recognition of universality entails a "relation" which is being drawn
here. Again, even if one does not put forward any normative idea behind that
relation - which Chatterjee doesn't - it is still necessary to address what is
meant by universality and why is it necessary. This would immediately bring
up normative and other issues of the "relation" which Chatterjee has avoided.
68 Tamir, Yale, Liberal Nationalism, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 199, p.90
69 Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and its Fragments, OUP, India, 1990
36
In the last passage from· Nehru where he makes the distinction between
British colonialism and the baggage of modernity, there appears a distinction
between a non-specific site of Western culture as it traveled into India, as
different from a more specific category of "agents", in this context, a "class" of
British colonialists, who were responsible for the entry of that culture. But as a
class, the British colonialists did not represent the modern consciousness. In
fact, according to Nehru, the modern consciousness came with its
progressive elements "in spite of' the preventive measures of colonial rulers.
The example of the steam engine, in spite of its instrumental value for the
colonizers, becomes a "value" even for Nehru, against the "medieval
structure". It will be pointed out immediately that here Nehru is attaching value
to technology. The point is true. But if we leave it here, a crucial issue to
which Nehru draws our attention will be missed. How does the introduction of
steam engine become a "big step" towards change in the medieval structure?
Though Nehru doesn't furnish us with the reason, the answer is easily found
in our knowledge of the caste system. Earlier, people of higher castes refused
to travel along with those of the lower castes. But the railway system, along
with other modern forms of transportation, forced people to travel together.
The modern forms of transportation in India brought in a sense of cultural
democracy. It cannot be seen merely as a rational process in itself but an
intervention into the rationality of religious social structure itself. In fact, in this
and other regard, the relationship between reason and religion, with reason
used as a handmaid of religion, need to be studied. It is to highlight how
religious arguments are couched in moral-universal terms by an a priori
knowledge of human beings which is put under a justificatory scheme which is
quite rational in its argumentation of forcing down laws. But reason here is
37
merely the instrument of a priori values that come before those arguments are
made, being held to be sanctimonious.
Once the provincial thought of Europe becomes universal philosophy it
confronts in its un~yersality the heterogeneity of cultures, and for that very
reason, the definitive aspects of culture re-orients the norm of universality into
a plural discourse. The nation-state need not be taken as a "single
determinate form" of community, but it is also important to note that a certain
history has forced cultures within the construction of a nation to negotiate its
issues within a nationalist framework. The nation as an "imagined community"
does rest upon a plural cultural discourse of localities. Since the nature of
modernity was similar "from the outside", a singular frame of reference did
form against which cultures responded in various manners. In this, the
economic nature of modernity, which coincides with capitalism, indeed turned
out to be a homogenizing problem. But at the level of cultural identities, the
problem was different: taking culture to be as definitive as capital, we find the
issue of modernity breaking up into two, namely, the problem of capitalism
and of culture. The "politics" of the state, if not its statute, and the cultural
aspects which form the nature of that politics, have more or less retained their
local forms in India. They coincide. Modernity has forced communities to
negotiate under a new paradigm. Democracy has brought in a new equation
to the power discourse within communities, where the suppressed can speak,
and it is impossible for modernity not to have left its mark on this very
possibility of cultures to address the question of power within itself as well as
in their relationship with the state. Modernity has opened up "new spaces"
within communities, where a group for example is not necessarily at an
38
advantage against an individual. Here, a chasm between the language of
demands and the language of the state is bound to appear. This chasm
appears precisely because the language of demands would be more rooted in
an emergent cultural manner of articulation whereas the state would try to put
them into a more generalized language of laws where principles would be
formed both out of negotiation as well as certain a priori directions of political
rule.
Let us now look at the other aspects of how Nehru looks at the coming of
modernity.
According to Nehru, the pre-war economic situation in the country was one
where India "became progressively ruralized"70. The British parliament
excluded Indian goods from getting into Britain, which included the overall
foreign market, and instead made British goods flow into the country. This
made craftsmen and artisans move towards the land. This led, Nehru writes,
to an ever-growing disproportion between agriculture and industry.
Nehru's reading of this phenomenon arises from the following observations:
"In every progressive country there has been, during the past century, a shift
of population from agriculture to industry; from village to town; in India this
process was reversed"71. Nehru finds that "our crisis in agriculture, grave as it
is, is interlinked with the crisis in industry, out of which it arose"72• This has
happened because:
70 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 299 71 Ibid. p. 299 72 Ibid. p. 301
39
"The crisis in industry spread rapidly to the land and became a permanent
crisis in agriculture. Holdings became smaller and smaller, and fragmentation
proceeded to an absurd and fantastic degree. The burden of agricultural debt
grew and ownership of the land often passed to moneylenders. The number
of landless labourers increased by the million. India was under an industrial-
capitalist period, minus many of the wealth producing elements of pre-
capitalist economy. She became a passive agent of modern industrial
capitalism, suffering all its ills and with hardly any of its advantages"73•
So for Nehru, it wasn't possible to go back against the trajectory of
industrialization. He wasn't aiming for self-sufficiency, but increased
production of goods.
The promise of productivity that the capitalist system had triggered off but
withheld out of colonial interests had to be acquired back through nationalist
production. It was the only "progressive" option to Nehru. Chatterjee finds the
nature of this choice, neither "a matter of moral or aesthetic choice" but "a
simple fact of modern life, determined globally by the conditions of modern-
day economic production"74. He quotes Nehru:
"It can hardly be challenged that, in the context of the modern world, no
country can be politically and economically independent, even within the
framework of international interdependence, unless it is highly industrialized
and has developed its power resources to the utmost..."75.
73 Ibid. p. 300 74 Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, OUP, Delhi, 1986, p. 143-44 75 Ibid. p. 144
40
Chatterjee finds Nehru bowing down to this deterministic choice already
dictated by 'the spirit of the age'. He quotes Nehru again, in this regard:
"Any argument as to the relative merits of small-scale and large-scale industry
seems strangely irrelevant today, when the world and the dominating facts of
the situation that confront it have decided in favour of the latter''76•
Nehru however does put the economic issue in social terms:
"The real question is not one of quantitative adjustment and balancing of
various incongruous elements and methods of production, but a qualitative
change-over to something different and new, from which various social
consequences flow. The economic and political aspects of this qualitative
change are important, but equally important are the social and psychological
aspects. In India especially, where we have been wedded far too long to past
forms and modes of thought and action, new experiences, new processes,
leading to new ideas and new horizons, are necessary"77•
So for Nehru, industrialization would be an important factor to bring about a
social change. Here again, the emphasis is on the change in the medieval
structure. Nehru thought that along with the problem of excess labour which
industrialization can absorb, the quality of life itself would improve. For him,
industrialization and social progress became synonymous. He was also
anxious of India standing up to the West in this regard: "An industrially
backward country will continually upset the world equilibrium and encourage
76 Ibid. p. 144 77 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p.408-409
41
the aggressive tendencies of more developed countries"78• For Nehru then,
the modern economic structure is one that will help achieve two ends: a
modern society of economic co-operation, which would lead to social co-
operation both at the national as well as international level. It was also an
issue of the balance of power vis-a-vis the international scene. So it was also
a purely realist issue. In aesthetic terms, Nehru was interested in the rising of
the standard of living. The cultural indicator somehow vanishes into the need
for modern industrial life. Nehru found the modern form of industrial growth as
one where he felt our minds will become active and adventurous. Nehru here
sounds like a quixotic spirit of modernity. In fact, it is Nehru's vehement faith
over the power of modern industry, which is quite marked.
However, Nehru introduces another element in the picture: the need for
planning. This is the socialist turn in Nehru's economic ideas. To begin with
however: "The original idea behind the Planning Committee had been to
further industrialization"79. Nehru laid down the basic principles behind the
idea of planning in these terms:
"(O)ur plan, as it developed, was inevitably leading us towards establishing
some of the fundamentals of the socialist structure. It was limiting the
acquisitive factor in society, removing many of the barriers to growth, and thus
leading to a rapidly expanding social structure. It was based on planning for
the benefit of the common man, raising his standards greatly, giving him
opportunities for growth, and releasing an enormous amount of latent talent
and capacity. And all this was to be attempted in the context of democratic
78 Ibid. p. 407 79 Ibid. p. 396
42
freedom and with a large measure of co-_operation of some at least of the
groups who were normally opposed to socialist doctrine"80.
Chatterjee quotes Nehru on how he found "the spirit of co-operation of the
members of the Planning Committee .. particularly soothing and gratifying",
and Nehru found it "a pleasant contrast to the squabbles and conflicts of
politics"81. In this, Chatterjee finds Nehru's approach to planning as "a realist's
utopia... a utopia supremely statist, where the function of government was
totally abstracted out of the messy business of politics and established in its
pristine purity as rational decision-making conducted through the most
advanced operational techniques provided by the sciences of economic
management"82.
As far as Nehru's analysis of the lnd.ian economic situation is concerned, one
1i neeas to look through the works of those times, like R. Palme Dutt's The
Problem of India, to find out similarities. We are not concerned with those
comparisons here. As far as the history of planning is concerned, it was first
implemented in the erstwhile Soviet state. There it was as supremely statist
an enterprise as Nehru envisioned it in India. Of course, on ideological
similarities, India was not a socialist country. It was anyway still under British
appendage. According to Chatte~ee, Nehru's economic ideas became "a
particularly useful theoretical foothold from which ... (he) could reach out and
embrace the rationalist and egalitarian side of Marxism, leaving its political
core well alone"83• Sanjay Seth has responded to Chatterjee's argument
80 Ibid. p. 400 (italics mine) 81 Ibid. p. 399 82
Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, OUP, Delhi, 1986,p. 160 83 Ibid. p. 145
43
about Nehru being "deliberately selective" in his "appropriation of Marxism".
Seth has asserted that Nehru's thought being consistent and coherent in its
use of Marxism was equally consistently and coherently a non-Marxist
politics. He feels that in colonies where Marxism was not a critique of
modernity and where it was shorn of a distinctive political core, such
appropriation of Marxism by nationalism is welcome84. In this context, we
leave the debate here with Nehru's own understanding regarding his
"appropriation" of Marxist principles along with his fundamental commitment
to the idea of democracy.
In one of his famous lectures Nehru said:
"Marx was primarily moved by the ghastly conditions that prevailed in the
early days of industrialization in .Western Europe. At that time there was no
truly democratic structure of the state, and changes could hardly be made
constitutionally. Hence, revolutionary violence offered the only way to change.
Marxism therefore, inevitably thought in terms of a violent revolution. Since
then, however, political democracy has spread bringing with it the possibility
of peaceful change ... The democratic structure of the state, organized labour
and, above all, the urge for social justice as well as scientific and
technological progress, have brought about this transformation"85.
In The Discovery, Nehru specified:
84 Seth, Sanjay, "Nehruvian Socialism -1927-37: Nationalism, Marxism, and the Pursuit of Modernity", Alternatives, in An Ethics of Responsibility in lntemational Relations and the Limits of Responsibility/Community, 1993, p. 453-473 85 Nehru, Jawaharlal, India Today and Tomorrow, Azad Memorial Lectures, 1959, Indian Council for Cultural Relations, 1960, p. 13
44
"Even a complete nationalization (so-called) of industry unaccompanied by
political democracy will lead to a different kind of exploitation, for while
industry will then belong to the state, the state itself will not belong to the
people"86•
In Chatterjee's schema there is no place for a distinction between a. statist
approach that is realist in an instrumentalist sense, and one that involves a
fundamental commitment to democracy. The point of argument is, that
Chatterjee looks at the statist approach as one where political ends serve
their own purpose without holding onto any principle as its desired end,
whereas a commitment to democracy would use the means-ends equation
with a specific normative thrust in mind. Lets leave the issue by pointing out
that in Nehru, the distinction is primary, and is in favour of the latter.
For Nehru, Chatterjee says, the primacy of the economic question is behind
his understanding of most social questions. Chatterjee holds Nehru's
response to the communal problem as the key indicator to this problem. He
quotes Nehru:
"Having assured the protection of religion and culture, etc., the major
problems that were bound to come up were economic ones which had
nothing to do with a person's religion."87
The key word here is "protection". It is a statist approach to the problem of
representing communal identities. But this approach takes it away from the
merely economic consideration that Chatterjee holds with regard to Nehru.
86 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 502 87 Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, OUP, Delhi, 1986,p. 141
45
For Akeel Bilgrami, Nehru's neutrality based statist approach "is an imposition -
rather in the sense that it assumed that secularism stood outside the
substantive arena of political commitments"66• He critiques Nehru, not for his
secular approach, but "with imposing a non-negotiated secularism"89. In this,
Bilgrami is more unsure than Chatterjee that the so-called representatives of
a religious co'mmunity could be a valid group of representatives.
At a more general level, Nehru's concerns were:
"The real problems for me remain problems of individual and social life, of a
proper balancing of an individual's inner and outer life, of an adjustment of the
relationship between individuals and groups, of a continuous becoming
something better and higher of social development, of the ceaseless
adventure of man"90_
Hence we see Nehru interested in an individualism, which is not the alienated
social being, but one aiming for "harmony" (surely a romantic conception).
The ideal is "social development". Nehru highlights the notion of duty
regarding the individual, as much as the basic issue of rights. We will stretch
this notion of individualism further in the 3rd chapter.
"What is this India":
In this section we would look at the various ways in which Nehru constructs
the meaning of "India". We would deliberately make a chronological reading of
how Nehru engages with the word "India" through The Discovery, to place the
88 Bilgrami, Akeel, 'Two Concepts of Secularism", ed. Sudipta Kaviraj, Politics in India, OUP, 1997 89 Ibid. p. 90 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 31
46
crucial moments of the text in perspective. In Nehru, the subjective and
representational "meaning" of India is put both in personal and general terms
at the beginning and the end of the text. This marks it against the rest of the .
text where India is mentioned in the matter-of-factly manner, and in quasi-
nationalist terms. But as we propose-to show, Nehru does not strictly define
nor represent India in nationalist terms. The aim here is also to show that just
as Stuart Hall has pointed out how the notion of '"The West"91 is also an idea,
a concept', Nehru's concept of "India" is also a representational mode which
seeks an independent classification, and not the borrowed generality of being
an "Orient". But - and this is the crucial aspect - unlike the "voyages of
discovery" by Europe, as it sought the "domination of the globe", which
resulted in the entire discourse of Orientalism, Nehru's is an inward voyage, a
voyage which, unlike the dominant sociological attitude of Western civilization,
is based upon a historical self-seeking discourse of meaning. Hence, it is
against this sociological (and not the schools of western philosophy) West,
which created the representational narrative of the East and the West, that
Nehru's discovery bears the crucial marks of resistance and self-evolution.
In The Discovery, Nehru embarks upon answering a question that is, to begin
with, a personal one: "What is my inheritance? To what am I a heir?"92 He
immediately proceeds to answer the premises:
'To all that humanity has achieved during tens of thousands of years, to all
that has it has thought and felt and suffered and taken pleasure in, to its cries
of triumph and bitter agonies of defeat, to that astonishing adventure of man
91 Hall, Stuart (ed.), 'The West and the Rest", Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, Routledge, 1996, p. 186. 92 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 36
47
-.
which began so long ago and yet continues and beckons to us. To all this and
more, in common with all men"93.
This is the Romantic subjectivist Nehru, with a marked universality of
belonging, and a desire for "a kind of unity across persons or across time".
However Nehru quickly adds:
"But there is a special heritage for those of us in India, not an exclusive one,
for none is exclusive and all are common to the race of man, one more
especially applicable to us, something that is in our flesh and blood and
bones, that has gone to make us what we are and what we are likely to be"94.
Nehru treats India's cultural identity as distinct but not relative. The idea of
universality is again implicit in Nehru's lines. Since we are looking at the issue
in a more subjective context, we can once again raise the issue of universality
differently: Is Nehru innocent of the ideological implications behind borrowing
the universalist discourse of a colonial power?
In the preface of Asish Nandy's The Intimate Enemy we find a quotation from
Albert Camus: "Through a curious transposition peculiar to our times, it is
innocence that is called upon to justify itself'95. He then lays down his own
premise: 'The two essays here justify and defend the innocence which
confronted modern western colonialism and it's various psychological
offshoots in lndia"96. Nandy is trying to point out the "innocence" of the
colonized in combating colonialism. It is an innocence that is ideological and
93 Ibid. p. 36 94 Ibid. p. 36-37 95 Nandy, Ash is, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. "Introduction", Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1983, p. i 96 Ibid. p. i .
48
yet it is through this innocence that the ideological battle against colonialism
was launched. This paradox of innocence creates a paradox regarding the
receiving of the colonial ideology in the first place. We can see a good
example with regard to the issue of universality. The notion of universality in
the colonial discourse stems from the Enlightenment idea of reason and the I
ideological baggage of colonialism as a symbol of progress vis-a-vis universal
history. But Indian nationalism countered an ethnocentric colonial discourse of
domination where universality is posed only in terms of European dominance
and not the freedom of the colonized. In Nehru's response, the idea of
universality gets based on a different "context": the reiteration of a universality
which in not European, hence not ethnocentric, and one which stems from a
realization of the contradiction in the colonial discourse and the universalistic
values of freedom enshrined in the Enlightenment. As we have shown, in
Nehru, culture is as definitive in this anti-colonial discourse as capital, and
reserves a partial autonomy in its critique of colonialism. Hence the discourse
of reason becomes both contextual in historical terms, and retains its
universalistic appeal against the ethnocentric logic of colonialism. Nandy
holds Nehru among the rationalist brigade of Indian nationalists who borrowed
the dominant, rationalist and masculinist strand of western colonial baggage
(and in turn the same strand in his own culture), unlike those like Gandhi '
whom Nandy approvingly places among those who had imbibed the dormant,
feminine strand of t~eir own as well as of western culture. We have discussed
the terms in which Nehru accepts universality. Without further going into the
merits of Nandy's view here, it's possible to read Nandy against the grain as
polemically as his own, and make an overarching point. One would like to ask
Nandy, why should there be a bigger problem about those nationalists
49
imbibing dominant western (and Indian) cultural strands in the ideological
battle against colonialism as against those who imbibed recessive ones, if
innocence indeed is the issue. Unless of course Nandy would wish to
differentiate between degrees of innocence, which he doesn't. It appears that
the "cunning" of reason, which Chatterjee feels is not curbed by nationalist
discourse, does seem to meet its match in anti-colonial "innocence" within the
ideological framework of anti-colonial nationalist thought.
To come back to Nehru's personal quest, India surfaces once again in the
following manner:
"During these years of thought and activity my mind has been full of India,
trying to understand her and to analyze my own reactions towards her''97• And
further: "I became obsessed with the thought of India. What was this India that
possessed me and beckoned to me continually, urging me to action so that
we might realize some vague but deeply felt desire in our hearts? The initial
urge came to me, I suppose, through pride, both individual and national, and
the desire, common to all men, to resist another's domination and have
freedom to live the life of one's choice"98.
Here we find, the notion of subjectivity is split into two domains: individual and
national. The two domains are of course overlapping, yet distinct as
categories. In Nehru, the individual and the national urge still however did not
answer the specific question, which "India" posed. India was still a "thought"
without a clear content, except a reason to action and a vague desire. So far
we see only a deep sense of subjective feeling in Nehru, behind the drive to
97 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 49 98 Ibid. p. 49
50
unearth the meaning of "India". It was a reason, paradoxically, submerged in
subjectivist depths. The obsession with the "thought of India" is a desperate
attempt to create meaning from an entity, which resists meaning. India is
difficult to grasp, to represent in thought, and hence becomes transcendental
to any historical category of meaning. It is almost like a metaphysical idea, '
hanging over its own reality. Nehru tries to retrieve some personal link for
himself, through the emotional elements of pride and desire, so that the
historical predicaments of freedom and domination could be addressed. It
was important to understand the meaning of India to bring it into history, and
provide the cultural grid of the nationalist discourse.
He says, for example: "My reaction to India thus was often an emotional one,
conditioned and limited in many ways. It took the form of nationalism. In the
case of many people the conditioning and limiting factors are absent. But
nationalism was and is inevitable in the India of my day; it is a natural and
healthy growth. For any subject country national freedom must be the first and
dominant urge; for India, with her intense sense of individuality and a past
heritage, it was doubly so"99.
Here it would be wrong to interpret the word "form" in the conceptual sense.
Nehru is undoubtedly using the word in a loose manner. The relationship
between trying to grasp the "meaning" of India and work out a principle of
nationalism is an open one in Nehru's case.
Nehru slowly thickens the narrative by asking, this time, more directional
questions:
99 Ibid. p. 52
51
"What is this India, apart from her physical and geographical aspects? What
did she represent in the past? What gave strength to her then? How did she
lose that old strength? And has she lost it completely? Does she represent .
anything vital now, apart from being the home of a vast number of human
beings? How does she fit into the modern world?100'.'
Nehru is seeking more control of the narrative here. He is interested in what
India "represented" in the past, and by this, for the first time objectifies the
subject. In the following four questions Nehru begins on a representational
mode to his enquiry, supplements it by looking for reasons behind the
trajectory of his enquiry, and finally anxious to find clues of recovering a new
relation: he holds India as being strong in the past; he wants to know the
reasons of that strength; he wants to know how strength was lost and whether
it has been lost for good; whether India had anything vital to offer at present;
and in what ways would she "fit" modernity. Here the subjective element is
totally replaced. India now represents an objective problem, which needs
researching. But so far, India is still empty of content except historical time.
The content that knocks at India's door is modernity. To relate India with that
content (and context), Nehru has to now find out what constitutes "this India"
from the past till the present moment.
But before Nehru could embark upon the business of discovering India, he
once again draws the personal link of the narrative, where the "I" as a subject
makes the subject of discovery a project of the self:
100 Ibid. p. 49
52
"India was in my blood and there was much in her that instinctively thrilled me.
And yet I approached her almost as an alien critic, full of dislike for the
present as well as for many of the relics of the past that I saw. To some extent
1 came to her via the West, and looked at her as a friendly westerner might
have done. I was eager and anxious to change her outlook and appearance
and give her the garb of modernity. And yet doubts arose within me. Did I
know India?- I who presumed to scrap much of her past heritage?"101•
Nehru draws a relation of kinship with India, and yet approaches the
relationship like an "alien critic". Nehru is sure of his kinship with India, but is
unsure about his "knowledge" about India. Knowledge about India was crucial
in terms of the second order relationship: that of the partly alien critic. The
Nehruvian self in this discourse is thus split into two: the self that "belongs"
and the self that is "critical". Knowledge is the bridge between the two selves.
The discourse of The Discovery is thus premised upon the desire for the
knowledge of India. This knowledge is however part of self-knowledge. Nehru
already belongs to India but also seeks to evaluate and re-establish the
relationship. Hence the relationship between Nehru's self-knowledge and the
knowledge he seeks about India is both subjective and objective. Nehru is
primarily interested in the "relationship" between belonging and criticism.
Belonging, for Nehru, seems to be the justificatory aspect behind criticism.
The discourse of Nehru's sense of belonging is what we turn to next.
In a pilgrim's mode, Nehru describes his forays into India's ancient past. He
"journeyed through India in the company of mighty travelers from China and
Western and Central Asia who came in the remote past and left records of
101 Ibid. p. 50
53
their travels"; he "wandered over the Himalayas, which are connected with old
myth and . legend"; he "visited old monuments and ruins and ancient
sculptures and frescoes - Ajanta, Ellora, the Elephanta Caves ... where every
stone told its story of India's past"; at Sarnath he "would almost see the
Buddha preaching his first sermon"; also "Ashoka's pillars of stone with their
inscriptions would speak ... in their magnificent language"; and at Fatehpur-
Sikri he visualized "Akbar, forgetful of his empire, seated holding converse
and debate with the learned of all faiths"102.
In the essay "Nation and Imagination", Dipesh Chakrabarty has interrogated
the plurality of the category of "imagination" as used in the context of
nationalism by Benedict Anderson 103• He places Tagore's poetic incarnation
of India in the phenomena of "darshan" ('seeing beyond'), where "the function
of the poetic", Chakrabarty explains, "was to create a caesura in historical
time and transport us to a realm that transcends the historical" and what
Tagore calls "the 'eternal'"104. Chakrabarty considers it as one of the "plural
and heterogeneous ways of seeing, not all of which may be captured by the
mentalist category of imagination"105. Chakrabarty further explains, for those
who capture this phenomenon, "it is a practice that, while creating a sense of
history, also takes them outside of historical time"106• We can now see
Nehru's pilgrim narrative at times concurring to the same phenomenon as he
describes his visionary moments in the face of past relics. These real
moments of encounter where the past echoes in the present, transports
Nehru's vision into a time beyond real historical experience, yet one where
102 Ibid. p. 50-52 103 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Studies in History, 15, 2, n.s. (1999), Sage Publications, New Delhi, p. 177 104 Ibid. p. 178 105 Ibid. p. 177 106 Ibid. p. 205
54
history -reverberates. Of course Nehru does not use an ecstatic -language
associated with a mystical vision. But the experience, as it surfaces in Nehru's
language, does suggest an aesthetic communion that is crowded with voices
from a "beyond" and is suggestive of visionary effects. It certainly speaks of
transformative moments in which Nehru could "see beyond". So Nehru's
discourse of belonging, which begins with recognition of historical kinship,
proceeds to articulate that sense through the romantic sojourns of a traveler,
and finally lights up as a daarshanik (visionary) mode of subjective
relationship.
A few pages later, Nehru is still far from the critical engagement he would
begin with India. He can be seen in a speculative mood about what India
stands for:
"Whether there was such a thing as an Indian dream through the ages, vivid
and full of life or sometimes reduced to the murmurings of troubled sleep, I do
not know. Every people and every nation' has some such belief or myth of
national destiny and perhaps it's partly true in each case. Being an Indian I
am myself influenced by this reality or myth about India, and I feel that
anything that had the power to mould hundreds of generations, without a
break, must have drawn its enduring vitality from some deep well of strength,
and have the capacity to renew that vitality from age to age"107.
Nehru consciously realizes that the "belief' of national destiny might very well
be a "myth". He therefore fuses the rational idea of constructing a realistic
nationalist goal with a mythical idea of historical regeneration. The more
107 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 55
55
conscious realization of the nationalist dream, which is "vivid and -full of life", is
· fused with an unconscious element of the "murmurings of troubled sleep": The
objective element of this view of a national destiny runs parallel to a
subjective one. However, the language is not embedded in a religious
imagery. Nehru, as pointed out before, treats the word "Indian" as a culturally
hybrid identity, and steers clear of any particular religious identity. But here,
any cultural construct is not in issue: the usual elements linked to nation as a
concept, whether subjectively as consciousness or objectively as the coming
together of what Ernest Renan calls "a series of convergent facts", is fused
with a mythical and unconscious notion 108• We can say that in Nehru's
discourse, the nation partly dissolves in a myth, or lives alongside one. The
name of that myth is "India".
Then we come to a famous imagery in The Discovery where Nehru calls India
an "ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had
been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased
what had been written previously"109•
This imagery of India, if read vis-a-vis any notion of a nation, seems to make
a point about vanishing yet- inerasable layers of narratives. The imagery
echoes what Homi Bhabha calls the "impossibly romantic and excessively
metaphorical" image of the nation where "nations, like narratives lose their
origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind's
eye"110. He has mentioned in The Discovery how ideas across civilizations
108 Renan, Ernest, "What is a Nation", from Homi Bhabha, ed. Narrating the Nation, London, Routledge, 1990, p. 12. 109 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 59. 110 Bhabha, Homi, ed_ Narrating the Nation, London, Routledge, 1990, Introduction.
56
were borrowed. This is a history of both writings and erasures, both sign and
trace.
From here we would move on to one of the famous episodes in The
Discovery, which has inspired reactions from critics. It is the "Bharat Mata"
episode:
"Often as I wandered from meeting to meeting I spoke to my audience of this
India of ours, of Hindustan and of Bharat, the old Sanskrit name derived from
the mythical founder of the race. I seldom did so in cities, for there the
audiences were more sophisticated and wanted stronger fare. But to the
peasant, with his limited outlook, I spoke of this great country for whose
freedom we were struggling, of how each part differed from· the other and yet
was India, of common problems of the peasants from north to south and east
to west, of the Swaraj, the self-rule that could only be for all and every part
and not for some ...
Sometimes as I reached a gathering, a great roar of welcome would greet me:
Bharat Mata ki Jai - Victory to Mother India! I would ask them unexpectedly
what they meant by that cry, who was this Bharat Mata, Mother India, whose
victory they wanted? My question would amuse them and surprise them, and
then, not knowing exactly what to answer, they would look at each other and
at me. I persisted my questioning. At last a vigorous Jat, wedded to the soil
from immemorial generations, would say that it was the dharti, the good earth
of India, that they meant. What earth? Their particular village patch, or all the
patches in the district or province, or the whole of India? And so question and
answer went on, till they would ask me impatiently to tell them all about it. I
57
would endeavour to do so and· explain that India was all this that they had
thought, but it was much more. The mountains and the rivers of India, and the
forests and the broad fields, which gave us food, were all dear to us, but what
counted ultimately were the people of India, people like them and me, who
·'were spread out all over this vast land. Bharat Mata, Mother India, was
essentially these millions of people, and victory to her meant victory. to these
people. You are parts of this Bharat Mata, I told them, you are in a manner
yourselves Bharat Mata, and as this idea slowly soaked into their brains, their
eyes would light up as if they had made a great discovery"111•
Dipesh Chakrabarty interprets the passage as one where,
"Nehru assumed that the matter of being in the presence of Bharat Mata was
a conceptual problem. He reduced practice to mere belief. He overlooked the
fact that the word dharti, meaning the earth, could not be reduced to the
specific geographical boundaries of British India and found the concept empty
of content. He proceeded to fill it up with the material proper to nationalist
thought. This was, in Bhabha's terms, a pedagogic moment of
nationalism"112•
I read Nehru's interpreting of Bharat Mata at the level of representation. The
peasant's answer that his dharti was Bharat Mata speaks of an age-old idea
of the dharti as the immediate land of livelihood. It symbolized two things for
them: the dharti as karam bhoomi (place of labour) and the dharti as a place
for balidan (sacrifice). Chatterjee interprets the same passage polemically in
terms of Nehru's rhetorical politics and calls it, like everything else about
111 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 59-61. 112 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Studies in History, 15, 2, n.s. (1999), Sage Publications, New Delhi, p. 205
58
Nehru, a "rationalist construction"113• Chatterjee doesn't give us any analysis
of the peasant's version of this imagery. He however, sympathetically viewed
the nationalist intelligentsia's representation of the nation as mother, "charged
with a deeply religious semiotic" which Nehru fails to understand114. What
Chatterjee fails to point out however is that this 191h century Hindu revivalist
imagery of the nation as mother comes from a very "logical" modernist fusion
. of the essentialist notion of the all-suffering yet strength-providing mother, and
the gendered notion of the nation as a symbol of maternal power and
sacrifice. The peasant's idea of the dharti as mother is a comparatively
naturalistic symbol, outside as it is of elitist cultural imagery. The problem in
Nehru's response however seems to be the hierarchization of the notion of
dharti as operating under a larger cultural boundary of the nation, where an
imagined community is taken as a higher framework of reference than a face-
to-face community. Nehru however, unfike what Chakrabarty asserts, doesn't
reduce "practice to mere belief'. He replaces one framework with another, of
course considering that Chakrabarty feels peasants can't imagine a complex
structure of dharti as mother in whatever sense of the symbolic. One should
add that Nehru's representation of Bharat Mata is a quasi-democratic one,
where the meaning of land is re-spiritualized under the anthropocentric
category. The notion of India, through the slogan of Bharat Mata, finds
meaning in popular parlance, as a way of identification and imagining, but it
was more of a physical and human reality. Nehru was after what lay "beyond"
this reality, this screen of history within history, where the meaning of India
was till elusive, as if holding some secret.
113 Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, OUP, Delhi, 1986, p. 147 114 Ibid. p. 147
59
After this incident, the narrative of India enters the nationalist discourse more
thickly as Nehru goes into critically evaluate India. In these pages, "India"
doesn't appear as a representational category but as mere appendage to the_
discourse of nationalism. It is a matter of paradox, that India as an identity is
only brought to surface in Nehru's subjectivist moments and not when he is
being the rationalist critic. The discourse of 'nationalism' finds Nehru focused
and optimistic about merging the progressive ideas of state-rule with a
harmonious national identity. The discovery of 'India' ends in the opposite
manner, with Nehru delightfully and creatively battling the myth he couldn't
"unveil". The epilogue raises the introductory question:
"The discovery of India -what have I discovered? It was presumptuous of me
to imagine that I could unveil her and find out what she is to-day and what she
was in the long past. To day she is four hundred million separate individual
men and women, each differing from the other, each living in a private
universe of thought and feeling. If this is so in the present, how much more
difficult is it to grasp that multitudinous past of innumerable successions of
human beings. Yet something has bound them together and binds them still.
India is a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a
bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads.
Overwhelmed again and again, her spirit was never conquered, and to-day
when she appears to be a plaything of a proud conqueror, she remains
unsubdued and unconquered. About her there is the elusive quality of a
legend of long ago; some enchantment seems to have held her mind. She is
a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and
pervasive. There are terrifying glimpses of dark corridors which seem to lead
60
back to primeval night, but also there is the fullness and warmth of the day
about her. Shameful and repellent she is occasionally, perverse and
obstinate, sometimes even a little hysteric, this lady with a past. But she is_
very loveable, and none of her children can forget her wherever they go or
whatever strange fate befalls them. For she is part· of them in her greatness
as well as her failings, and they are mirrored in those deep eyes of hers that
have seen so much of life's passion and joy and folly, and looked down into
wisdom's well. Each one of them is drawn to her, though perhaps each has a
different reason for the attraction or can point to no reason at all, and each
sees some different aspect of her many-sided personality"115.
After pages of arguing for science and rationality, albeit with moments of
doubt and despair, Nehru seems to finally succumb to a purely subjectivist
imagery. The objectivist approach totally collapses in the face of a strong,
erotic imagery of a veiled mystery called "India". Nehru's imagery of India is
gendered from the start. But that is not the most distinctive aspect of the
discourse. With an evocative and rich sway of descriptions, Nehru fuses the
primordial and the modern. The "multitudinous past of innumerable
successions of human beings" today becomes the "four hundred million
separate individual men and women". Nehru steers clear of any hegemonic or
majoritarian idea of India. He maintains what Yael Tamir calls "normative
diversity" in his imagining of the roots idea 116. Nehru has never had a purely
individualistic conception of the nation-community. But he has treated the
individual as a basic category among social and cultural formations. Here,
allied to an excess of imagination, the discovery of India takes Nehru outside
115 Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery, OUP, 1964, p. 562-63. 116 Tamir, Yael, Liberal Nationalism, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1993, p. 90
61
the thematic and problematic of nationalism. It renders -individuals their
"private universe" in a purely subjectivist mode _of narrativity. This subjectivity
of the individual is not presented in terms of any rational autonomy but as an.
individual in his unique and specific imagining of India. There occurs a break
between Nehru's constructivist approach of the nation-state, and the
discovery of "India". India, in a way, de-constructs the nationalist part of the
narrative. In fact Nehru leaves us wondering about India. India becomes an
indeterminate concept. It is this rupture between the nationalist discourse and
the idea of India, which is one of the most distinctive aspect of Nehru's
narrative. But it precisely leaves us with a problem of imagining the nation.
Having rendered India into a myth-language which is removed from the
specificities of religion, race, region or any particular group, and laying down a
free imaginative play of individuars lost within the nation, Nehru allows the
image of India to escape any political connotation, whereas he consciously
also tries to install a particular political regime with specific value-systems.
He creates yet another rupture at the level of political imagination, which
makes the "palimpsest" exist on its own and the politics within that
palimpsest.;.ic universe to invent its own freewheeling exercise. What would
have to be answered for in this kind of an image making, is how precisely is a
political order in India justified through the discourse of the idea of India. What
Nehru doesn't show is how politics and this idea of India goes or don't go
together and how one definition might slide into the other.
62